Escape from the Ivory Tower: The Haskell Journey
Simon Peyton Jones traces Haskell from a research curiosity to an industrial language — and is candid about which ideas mattered and which ones didn't.
Haskell Is Useless
Simon Peyton Jones, Erik Meijer·2011·Channel 9A short, sharp exchange where SPJ explains why starting from safety and reaching for usefulness is a fundamentally different journey than starting from usefulness and reaching for safety.
Maybe Not
Rich Hickey·2018·Clojure ConjHickey takes aim at Maybe/Optional and the conflation of optionality with absence — arguing that wrapping types is the wrong place to encode 'I might not give this to you.'
Procedural Programming: It's Back? It Never Went Away
Kevlin Henney·2018·ACCUHenney goes back to the sixties to show that 'procedural' was never the slur we made it into — and that much of what we call modern style is older than we think.
Effective Programs — 10 Years of Clojure
Rich Hickey·2017·Clojure ConjRich Hickey on what a decade of Clojure has taught him about the kinds of problems most production code is actually trying to solve — and why static type systems aren't the answer he keeps hearing about.
The History of Rust
Steve Klabnik·2016·ACMSteve Klabnik tells the story of how Rust got from Graydon Hoare's side project to a 1.0 release — and the design culture that made the language what it became.
A Brief History of JavaScript
Brendan Eich·2016·FluentBrendan Eich on inventing JavaScript in ten days, the politics that shaped it, and the long arc from Mocha to modern ECMAScript.